Julie’s spending this summer hacking into New York’s real estate market with RentHackr!

08. Aug, 2014 Comments Off

1. You work for Renthackr – any tips for incoming Pace students looking to rent in the fall?

USE RENTHACKR! Even just for curiosity’s sake. You can get some insider tips on buildings in the area, see where your Facebook friends live, and get an idea of how expensive rent really is. We also just added a “find by room” feature so you can find a room and skip out on some of the apartment hunting drama.

2. Could you tell us (briefly) what you’re working on this summer?

I’m one of two interns, and we are essentially the engineering team right now. Renthackr is built with Ruby on Rails primarily, and I’m really polishing my Ruby skills. I also have the pleasure of being in charge of the analytics of the site, so I’m getting to take the data from Ruby to D3.js graphs. It’s really fun getting to learn how to work with the full stack through challenges fixing up the existing application.

3. The work you’re doing right now… do you think there’s a particular subject you took last semester that’s helping you? Or a particular Professor who’s teachings deserve a shout out?

Dr. Wolf’s class on Ruby on Rails gave me a good foundation, and showed me what I’d be up against in the web development world. Dr. Scharff’s Programming Languages and Implementations class also has been an amazing help in my process of learning Ruby inside and out. I understand different datatypes better, and know where to look in the language to work out logic problems.

4. How does the co-working space at WeWork differ from the co-working space at Pace, Seidenberg? (Warning: Just checking to see where your loyalties lie)

WeWork is beautiful. So is Seidenberg. But WeWork is really a coworking space to be reckoned with. The design of the whole space is very welcoming and beautiful. The view from my desk couldn’t be better. Seidenberg has a great video game set-up, but so does WeWork to be honest. However, a whole lot more collaboration and teaching goes on at Seidenberg. A lot more work gets done at WeWork.

Julie Gauthier is an undergrad student at the Seidenberg School, majoring in computer science. She’s also the student manger at Seidenberg’s Creative Labs, overseeing tech projects from concept to completion, and happens to be the biggest fan of Dubstep DJ, Skrillex.